Chapter 15: Weaving Guilford's

15 Weaving Guilford's Web Michael B. Strickland Guilford College Robert M. Whitnell Guilford College There is no Final Word. There can be nojnal version, no last thought. There is always a new view, a new idea, a new interpretation. -Theodor H. Nelson, inventor of the term hypertext Introduction: Student Empowerment and Responsibility About the time that the World Wide Web exploded out of its original niche in the scientific research community, the business community, the general academic community, and many individual users realized its power for the provi- sion and acquisition of information. Like many institutions, Guilford College recognized the need to have a presence on the Web in order to provide information to its diverse audience: current and prospective students, their parents, alumni, donors, and other friends of the college. However, like many small colleges, the human resources that could be devoted to the development of a site were limited. How then could Guilford create a presence that would truly reflect the college, its students, staff, and faculty? The answer lay in the collaborative, hands-on approach to learning and the tradition of student empowerment that is characteristic of the college, and here we perceived a rare opportunity. In January 1995, we proposed a course which would have as one of its goals the complete creation of the Guilford College Web site. The students would work with the administration, the faculty, and other students to develop the site, from top to bottom. Even given the unlikely nature of this class-an English professor and a chemistry professor collabo- rate to teach a course on communicating with computers and ask that the students in that class be given full responsibility for the image the college presents on the World Wide Web-the administration (president, provost, academic dean, Weaving Guilford's Web 191 dean of admissions, head of computer services, etc.) accepted this idea not just willingly, but enthusiastically. So in August 1995, twenty-three students and one librarian came together in our course, "Communicating with Computers: Spinning the Web." In the ensuing four months, they would construct a site for Guilford College (http://www.guilford.edu) that surpassed what we thought was possible. And they would do a lot more in the process. In the following chapter we first describe the history of this project. We then discuss the class itself and how the discussion of the broader, interdisciplinary issues of electronic media studies, especially as they encompass new technologies such as the World Wide Web, ended up being reflected in the site that the students produced. We also explore the implications of courses such as this that exploit the potential of the Internet for communication across the curriculum (CAC). Finally, we look to the future and how we intend to continue this project as we adapt to developing technologies. Throughout this process we were rnind- ful of the dynamic influence of electronic media on the traditional classroom environment, and tended to agree with George Landow's claim that Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threat- ens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type. (1992, 19) From Campus Community to Virtual Community One of the many strengths of Guilford College in the real world has always been its sense of community. That community crosses many of the natural bound- aries that often separate students, faculty, and administration, and is reflected in our tradition of students and faculty being deeply involved in all facets of the college's operation, from curricular policy to hiring a new president. Guilford has always sought not just to create such a community here, but to find practical applications on a larger scale for its values orientation and mode of teaching as well- thus its rich history of social involvement. As we began to examine how to take Guilford into the virtual world of the World Wide Web, we wanted that sense of community and student empowerment reflected in the Guilford Col- lege Web site. After all, as more and more students do research for prospective colleges online, a Web presence becomes one of the most ubiquitous and dynamic ways an educational institution can present itself. But the course and project that we describe here is not just about teaching HTML or surfing the Web for credit. Throughout, our goal was to help our students examine what it meant to be communicating and providing information in the face of rapidly changing rules: where the control of the time and means of access to information is shifting from the provider to the consumer. Certainly any course that 192 Miclzael B. Strickland and Robert M. Whitnell utilizes hands-on content production for the Web can explore this, but in this instance we perceived a chance to channel the interests of an entire community through the activities of a class. What we hoped to accomplish was to make this class become the dynamic interface between traditional liberal arts learning, interdisciplinary project-based education, and real-time inquiry into computer- supported communications (CSC) and how it is changing the world. We there- fore had a unique opportunity: we would work with our students to construct the official presence of Guilford College on the World Wide Web. The result of a semester of hard work was a site that represents much of what makes Guilford a unique institution. But it was also a site that belonged to the entire community-not to the administration, not to the Information Technology and Ser- vices department, not just to a limited group of faculty. The Course: A Shaping Influence From the beginning, we were adamant that the students study what these new methods of CSC meant and not just the mechanics of doing it. To that end, we designed a rigorous semester reading list based on the theme of the role of visionaries and the problems inherent with the implementation of new techno- logical ideas.' Our first task was to quickly provide the students with the context for the World Wide Web. Our readings in this area were three-pronged. First, articles from Internet World and Wired provided a history of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Second, Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, by exploring the implications of digitizing information, allowed the students to see a vision of where this medium might go.2We wanted the students to realize from the outset that our focus on making information accessible through the Web was merely an illustration of much deeper and more comprehensive issues involving digital forms of communication. As Negroponte points out. Being digital will change the nature of media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. This is a radical change, because our entire concept of media is one of successive layers of filterings which reduce information and entertain- ment to a collection of "top stories" or "best sellers" to be thrown at differ- ent "audiences." (1995, 84) Finally, we traced back through the history of hypertext and communication using the writings of Vannevar Bush ("As We May Think") and Ted Nelson ("As We Will Think"). The historical readings were important both to our students who were quite familiar with the Web, as they needed to see that the underlying ideas are ones that have been around for fifty years or more, and to our students who were just beginning to explore the medium and needed to see Weaving Guilford's Web 193 that the Web represents a natural continuation of a line of inquiry into better ways of accessing and providing information. For example, we introduced our students to the notion that the footnote or endnote is an example of hypertext since it is a link which the reader follows to another part of the text to find information whose relevance may be high or merely tangential.' We then turned to the question of why the World Wide Web was so effective and became so popular while previous attempts to improve the accessibility of information, such as gopher, were only adopted by the cognoscenti. One area to which we paid particular attention was the ease of use of the Web. The interface is, for the most part, highly obvious. Click on some blue text and you go to someplace new. Our readings in this area took us to the discipline of the psy- chology of industrial design, as explored by Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (1990). Again, the Web becomes a single illustration of a much larger issue in this field: how do we achieve our stated goals? If we want people to be able to access our information, how can we design our site to make that access efficient and painless-even enjoyable? The lessons learned from Norman's work and from putting his concepts into practice will be used by our students repeatedly no matter what field they pursue. In fact, the epithet "bad design" became quite common during late-night work sessions. Negotiating this complex matrix of purposes and multiple audience needs became a rhetorical exercise that is one of the benefits of project-based education. Students are all-too-accustomed to satisfying the expectations of a teacher, but when you add to the mix the responsibility of fulfilling the needs of a bevy of administra- tors and peers and a true audience of global dimension, you raise the rhetorical stakes immensely.

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